In order to increase or reduce the stepping rate of such a timepiece, it has heretofore been the practice to change a parameter in the oscillator circuit which determines its resonant frequency, e.g., by adjusting a variable capacitor. This expedient, however, does not assure a stable long-term correction since the capacitances of variable condensers are subject to drift.
In our U.S. Pat. No. 3,916,612 referred to above, we have disclosed and claimed a circuit arrangement for varying the stepping rate of the pulse-responsive drive means by selectively feeding back pulses from one or more lower-frequency stage outputs of the frequency divider to its input via an anticoincidence gate, specifically a gate of the Exclusive-OR (XOR) type, inserted between the oscillator and the divider input.